Welcome to the fourth edition of the Weekly Roundup!
Today we’ve got quite a bit to cover on some upcoming and currently A/B tested
changes,
Meta’s payment solution for the layman user, Facebook Messenger’s
quirky Soundmojis and more.
اضافة اعلان
Spotify
gets rid of Car View, releases yearly roundup
For the uninitiated,
Spotify’s Car View was
essentially a more basic version of their usual player that would activate once
the app detected that the user was en route to their destination in a private
vehicle.
This was a feature that was implemented for safety
purposes in order to prevent users from having to accurately activate certain
features on the app while driving. Instead, the back, play/pause, and next
buttons became larger, the name of the song was enlarged, and most of the app’s
additional features were turned off until Car View was manually turned off by
the user.
It looks like Spotify has begun eliminating this
feature as users are reporting that it no longer activates, neither
automatically or manually, and has caused a little frustration amongst the
Spotify user base.
It turns out that the company killed off one of its
simplest yet most user-friendly features in hopes of building something new —
at least, that is what Spotify’s official announcements have stated.
However more contrarian opinions on the internet have
been vocal about this move being used as a power tool in order to force in
Spotify’s latest product — the “Car Thing”.
The “Car Thing” is a smart media player for devices
that looks to revolutionize the audio digital medium on your way home. It acts
as a secondary device that is connected, or linked, via Bluetooth to your
device and is, for all intents and purposes, an additional remote for your
car’s sound system.
However, while this may sound futuristic and great for
tech geeks, it comes at a JD72 cost and isn’t even available anywhere in the
world outside of the US. Jailbroken versions can be found from certain
retailers in the Middle East, however at a significant markup.
While it’s unclear if anything is going to replace Car
View anytime soon, users are left wondering whether or not removing Car View from
Spotify’s functionality was a cash-grab or a genuine push for more innovation.
In other Spotify related news, a small, nifty, and
timely feature was released known as the “Wrap Up of 2021”. It gives users an
overview of the songs they played throughout the year along with the total
amount of time each song was listened to.
They include global statistics and metrics, too; head
over to Spotify to check out the most streamed songs around the world, along
with their total listen times across all users globally and potentially
discover your next big morning hit.
Meta’s
payment solutions expand
Meta, formerly known as
Facebook Inc. has created a
built in payment solutions into their Messenger app called “Split Payment”.
For all intents and purposes, Split Payment allows
users to create goals for a collective group to achieve, which can then be
contributed to by corresponding parties directly through their Facebook
Messenger app.
The feature is currently being tested in the US,
however a full rollout is anticipated to happen early in 2022 for all users
across the world.
Facebook’s
quirky Soundmojis
While not exactly a breaking headline, users can all
agree that Facebook does have a tendency to release quirky and unasked-for
updates to its apps — and as a result they now have ... Soundmojis.
As the name would suggest, Soundmojis are emojis that
have a particular sound effect attached to them that play out when opened by
the receiving party.
The sound bites aren’t just your average sound of
applause for a clapping emoji either — there are many fun Easter eggs like the
zipped-mouth emoji playing voice lines from Stranger Things, and the hourglass
playing a snippet from a Drake song.
While no one ever asked for this, it just goes to show
that, somehow, Facebook continues to try to shake things up in a relatively
dated and seemingly fully explored technology.
Microsoft
develops own video editor for Android
Microsoft has not been forthcoming about why they decided
to invest their time into a seemingly small upgrade to their
Android arsenal,
it is nevertheless official: Microsoft now has a video editor for Android
users.
The editor is relatively basic, with the majority of
its functionality lying in the mixer’s ability to piece together video, add
basic filters, and crop videos.
As mentioned, it’s not quite clear why time was
invested into the app — after all, there are plenty of alternatives available
on the market from alternate developers that offer significantly more functionality,
for free, to their users. Examples of such apps include InShoot, Premiere Rush,
and more.
While we are yet to receive a genuine Photoshop
experience on our phones, this move from Microsoft may potentially signal a
shift into the digital media space with the continued rise of TikTok and
similar platforms.
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